Is it wrong to have an Anarchist party?

That's the difference between anarchism (libertarian socialism) and authoritarian socialism like Maoism, Leninism and what have you. We believe you can't reform things for the better in government, we can only beuild socialism from the bottom up.

I assume you're in the Pendle constituency

Shazad Anwar - Liberal Democrat

Tom Boocock - British National Party

Graham Cannon - UK Independence Party

Jane Ellison - Conservative

Gordon Prentice - Labour

Who will keep the BNP out? Labour? Tory? What a choice! Both as much responsible for the rise of fascism in the North West as anything else.

Last year it was the vote for the Lib Dems that kept the BNP out of Pendle...I assume it will be the same this year.

Ok Steve...

All I know is that last year the BNP didn't manage to get candidates voted in, in the Pendle areas...partly due to the distribution of Searchlight and other anti-BNP material, I hope, and partly due to the vast amount of people voting for the most popular political party in Pendle, which happened to be the Lib Dems...

Did you not understand my post?

You *cannot have* an anarchist government - the word means "without government" ffs! If you believe that, that is Leninism/Trotskyism, as I explained above, and that has failed miserably every time it has been tried.

The state is an unnatural organ which denies people their freedom, this is done at the benefit of business. The state is an executive for the rich and powerful, therefore we try and give it no legitimacy, either through calling on reforms or participating in any of its bodies....

Human beings are social and co-operative beings (at least they need to be to survive) therefore we pose grassroots (bottom up, horizontal) solutions to their top down approach. This effectively means that entering government is wrong, it also means that we will be put in a situation of compromising our belief that government is a repressive instution.

Voting is essentially a waste of time because different competing approaches (liberal, left, conservative, fascist) are all authoritarian...although it could be argued that some are more libertarian than others.

Potentially voting should be utilised to 1) undermine the state, such as the Sinn Fein tactic of standing in elections but then refusing to take power, 2) voting to avoid fascists etc coming to power.....

Sorry if the response is jargon, but Toxictears you misunderstand a few of the ABCs of anarchism.

try looking at the anarchist FAQ

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/

Also why not trying to see if anyone local can send you some literature or have a chat....

Hi,

Some people above have said about 'surely its better if get into power and can make some reforms etc etc'. I sympathise with this position, but think it doesnt take into account properly the structures of state/corporate power.

Firstly, Im not totally anti-reform as some are, though I kind of agree with all the anti-reform anarchist arguments, including defacto legitimising the state - but if your starving or dying of some disease etc etc then I dont think youd be too worried where your reforms come from. For this purpose Id sometimes support a duel power approach, kind of push the state from outside (strictly from outside though..no co-option/co-operation thankyou!) and if you win, well ok, your a bit better off and continue the revolutionary struggle and if you lose it can expose the limits of state capitalism and so help the revolutionary struggle (if its played right, it doesnt allways work out this way I accept - but theres no 'allways right' answers).

But this 'from inside' stuff is nonsense. As people have pointed out it CANNOT be 'anarchist' it can only be closer to authoritarian socialism. But maybe thats not even the main point. To me its all a question of effectiveness. Some people make the mistake of looking at who they THINK has the power to change things, and says 'well, they dont use it for good, but if I got in, I would'. This has been the basis of past 'universal suffrage' type campaigns as well as 'Ill get in and change things' type campaigns. This missunderstands the current structures.

Someone mentioned as an example of where voting/getting to power would be a good idea as a local issue that a candidate is on yer side on. Well a real life example is what happened in my town. Company wants to build deadly waste plant. They do it all by the book and legal. Bugger, nothing to catch em out on. So, we got together a bunch of independent candidates who were on our side. Town+Country planning act allows local authorites to revoke a planning consent. It sounded a good bet. So, we (allmost single handedly) unseated the labour council of the last 22yrs. The independents got into power and started the process. The council officers say, if you do that the company can sue you for compensation using another bit of town+country planning act. It will bankrupt the town. We check it out, turns out the bastards are right. The company threaten to bankrupt the town sueing for £200 million. The new council has no choice but to give in. So after a year of hard wark, we're back where I said a year ago - DIRECT ACTION!

Other examples are WTO/IMF laws/conditions which override national laws (even big rich western ones sometimes!). So once you get in power you find that actually, you really havnt got as much power as you thought you'd have, yer hands are tied. So you keep compromising for the rest of yer time - or you get back out and go direct from below.

Like when Mexican gov for once agreed with people, tried to use their environmental protection to kick out apolluting company...the company complained to WTO and the gov were forced tolet the company back in AND pay them 16 million in compensation.

Another example is recent events in Equador. Gutierez gets into power on the side of the poor, peasants, indigenous. For whetever reason, as soon as hes in power he turns his back and sells out to neo-liberalism. So then the people have to go direct again to oust the fucker. Hopefully now they can/will keep going and oust the rest of the politicians, TNC's, WTO/IMF, USA etc etc too

Honestly? Dont know. I would have been torn. Probably would have organised with them, but tried to push the arguments of why its not enough. If theres a gov, then having a vote is maybe a bit better than not. BUT its also a bit like asking "bullet in the head - or the chest...?"

P.S. No, I wont be voting. Not worth getting out of bed for. And before anyone says it, BNP arent really an issue where I live, great racial harmony, and anyway, John was right about how can you tell whether your strategy is gonna help or hurt?

Smirk.

Our country, like any other liberal democracy, is run on a parliamentary system, whereby every 4 years we give a party a mandate (often a mere 20% of the voting-age population), during that time they can put forward laws and economic reforms to a vote within parliament and are also given a range of emergency powers and military controls, although there are legal means by which certain leaders can be impeached if they take things too far and upset the liberal-conservative consensus, as happned with nixon in the watergate scandal.

A parliament therefore is not accountable to its people, there is no way we can control them, a parliament is solely in the hands of the capitalist class. Working class people, even those involved in the party at a lower level cannot hold a parliamentary organisation accountable once it achieves state power. The classic example in recent years was the German Green Party of the late 80's and early 90's, not particularly revolutionary or whatever, but it did have a major social charter and organised radical local groups attatched to it, i can think of numerous friends who became interested in socialist politics through that party, however once the party achieved power, the parliament distanced itself from its local groups, climbed straight into bed wioth big business and abandoned its charter, but theres was no way people could stop this, because a parilement holds the reins of state power.

If workers ran their own industries and co-ordinated production and distribution themsleves, what need would we have for politicians? Their jobs, ridiculouslously large pensions, lucrative biography contracts and private contacts all depend ont he maintenance of capital. Take capitalism away and the stand to lose everything, therefore their interests lie with the capitalists and not with the working class.

A good description of the problems of parliaments and how they should be replaced with workers organisations can be found here

http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/wcon106.htm

So no, an anarchist party in the way you describe it would not be a good idea.

I won't be, dunno about other people, up to them i guess.

Lot of good stuff here. Naturally, government cannot be reformed cos it's fundamental nature is the use of force and the threat of force (i.e. authority). Democracy is an illusion of freedom.

Anyone remember the description of "british democracy" in Yes Minister? As I recall it goes:

Sir Humphry to Bernard: "British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the opera, radio three, the countryside, the law, the universities... both of them. And we are that system. We run a civilised aristocratic government tempered by occasional general elections. Since 1832 we have been gradually removing the voter from the system of government. Now we've got them to a point where they just vote once every 5 years to see which bunch of buffoons will try and mess up OUR policies and you are happy to see all that thrown away?!"

Ahem... anyway, back to topic. Certainly the revolution ain't gonna happen too soon and in the meantime we've all got to live so it makes sense to keep some reform happening as we go. However, there is also another point of view (which I don't entirely subscribe to, before you flame me) which goes the other way: as anarchists, it does not help us for the system to be reformed because then people will think that things are OK and a revolution isn't necessary. You could certainly argue the case that revolutionary politics is at it's strongest under oppression, e.g. the communist resistance to the nazis, the european and global response to Dubya's theft of power in 2000. Therefore, in order to kick-start a process of revolutionary change, what we need isn't a government sympathetic to anarchists, but one which shows the system for what it truly is. We need a government which is openly destructive and cancerous to the human species. We need an elected party which cannot defend itself as being pro true freedom.

This is a point of view that I feel we (anarchists) can support because we don't believe in democracy as we have it. We realise that if we do vote, it is not because it is our duty to our glorious free nation, but it will serve as a temporary means to a temporary end until we are all ready to do our revolution thing. In that case doesn't it make more sense to work towards this revolution we keep talking about, rather than wasting time trying to make a dead system work? In other words...

Vote Conservative - Because They Really Are Bastards!

Isn't it an old Bolshevik strategy?

The problem with the old 'once it gets bad enough they'll come to us' bollocks is that when it does get bad enough, people's first reaction when you say 'we've got the solution' will be 'what the fuck were you doing ten years ago?'. PLus frankly the sort of person who'd say that would be just the kind of person who should NEVER be allowed near revolutionary politics.

So should anarchists be calling for a boycott of the election like the trotskyite Workers Power are?

Good point. I've been saying for ages that too many people are just sitting around waiting for the revolution and for everything to swing our way. Get real, it's highly unlikely to happen in our lifetime or in several lifetimes. Social centres and protests may be useful but they are simply not going to win other enough people in order to get the changes in society that we would wish to see. What would be wrong with working through the current system purely until there is a mandate to change the way this country works? The only governing would be transitional in terms of helping to set up the structures through which a fairer society would operate. If there was a revolution tomorrow I'm sure anarchist groups would be involved in helping to set up structures such as workers councils etc so what's the difference?